She got up as usual to run her hot bath today.
“First, you run a nice, hot bath. Then take off all your clothes. Doesn’t matter if they find you naked. You’re dead so you won’t be embarrassed! Climb in the bath and lie back. Then relax with a bottle of sherry. Make sure your wrists are nice and hot from the water. It numbs them. So does the sherry. Then get a nice new razor blade…you slit the vein, right here. You can cut across it. Or slice down the length. Like this. Down the length is more effective than across….”
It was the plan she already had in her head.
But she isn’t dead.
The bathroom door wasn’t locked when I heard the cries. And the ambulance got here really quickly after I ran to the call box. The blood looked like cumulonimbus clouds before the storm. We’re learning about cloud patterns in geography.
Mum says I am very brave, and I am definitely the man of the house now, but my daddy already made me the man of the house when I was seven.
Trust you are looking after Mum, as you are the man of the house now. Are you doing a good job? Yes! I thought you would.
I say my prayers every night to God and to Jesus. I’ve never missed a night. I tuck my knees up to my chin and count to a thousand. And sometimes I say the Lord’s Prayer.
Our Father, which art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name.
God help her. Please, Jesus, help her. For the love of God.
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They’ve sectioned Margueretta under the Mental Health Act to be locked up for her own safety and for the safety of others. She’s eighteen, and that’s the only way you can lock up an adult against her will. She said she would change, and she would never stop taking her pills again. And everyone said they’ve heard it all before, but it’s too late now.
So they’ve her locked up.
I don’t think they will ever let her out again. And for now, she is in a straitjacket because she said she would kill herself or someone else if she was ever locked up again. Mum said it’s too stressful to go to that lock-up ward so she’s not going back anymore to visit Margueretta. So Margueretta will just have to stay in there on her own with all the mad people and the bars on the windows and doors. Yes, she can stay in there for the rest of her life. On the inside.
“Maybe some movie star will find her in there and take her away from all of this!”
Mum had to come home early from work last week. She said she was staring at some numbers at her desk when the lights went out, and she thought it was a power cut. But the lights were still on, and she was blind. So they helped her into a taxi.
Her sight has come back already. It was the mind’s way of shutting down. Dr. Wilmot said she’s had a complete nervous breakdown, and I need to look after her. I don’t mind looking after my mum, but she doesn’t seem like my mum anymore. She says things I don’t understand about the mysteries of the world, and the other day she started crying and handed me a letter to read.
“Look at this, Johnny. I’m sorry for you to have to find out this way. He’s dead. You need to know how he died. Your father is dead. He had lung cancer. They cut one lung out, and then he contracted pneumonia. I’m so sorry.”
I read that letter, of course.
St Mary’s Hospital
My Dear Emily and John
Many thanks for all you have done for me, and tried to help me. Well, we are hoping my operation will be a success. But if it’s the Lord’s Will to call me home, don’t grieve about me as I am an old man now and I have had my day. I would have liked to have been with you and the dear children a while longer, but it can’t be helped. Just stick to each other and the children. Dear Wee Margueretta, Wee Emily, and Wee Johnny. They are nice Wee Bairns.
God Bless you all and keep you till we meet again. Remember me to every one.
All the Best
Your loving Father
The letter was dated 22 November 1959. I told Mum that this letter was from my dad’s dad, and my father isn’t dead at all as far as we know.
“Mum! This letter is dated 1959. It’s not from my dad. It’s from my grandpa, and it’s addressed to you and my dad.”
But she said she was sorry my father was dead. Dr. Wilmot said not to worry because she will get better, and all of this will pass.
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I gave Mum the choice, and she said she wants the kitchen repapered first because those roses have turned from red to brown. So I’ve picked out a vinyl wallpaper with green and white flowers from Le Bon Marché in Portsmouth. I will make a start on the walls on Sunday. And with the oak-effect parquet being finished, we’ve got a carpet for the front room. A bright, orange carpet from the Littlewoods Catalog. I cut it to fit with scissors because it is wall-to-wall carpet.
People who go to grammar school have wall-to-wall carpet and vinyl wallpaper. They do not have a front room—it’s a lounge. And it’s not tea—it’s dinner. And they eat Black Forest gateaux if they are having tea, which would be in the middle of the afternoon.
I sleep without a nightlight, and the dark night sky has come down already tonight and it’s rushing into every space between the stalks in the wilderness outside my window. It is dark at the beginning, and it is dark at the end. The dark joins with the giant blackness that is in the attic because it is too big for that space. And then to the darkness inside my head that I stole from the cellar.
We will always know what is inside Margueretta’s head because we all lived there for a long, long time not only as voyeurs but also as participants, taking secret photos.
That’s why I lie awake at night until some vile hallucination makes me think my arms and legs are suspended from the ceiling while my body is sliding down the stairs like limbless, black treacle. I’m a helpless, drowning amputee in a sea-anemone forest of arms.
They come into my room, but I never look at them. Angels of death knock inside the walls, always waiting for someone to die, until there is a death. And when they grow silent, the thing from the corner of the cellar comes down from the attic, eyes bulging out like my big, green marbles.
And then I sleep. And the nightmares begin.
Night, night Margueretta. Now you can sleep with an orange nightlight glowing in your bedroom after dark, reflecting little moons and stars on the ceiling. And dream the sweetest dreams of little girls and wear your pretty party dress for your daddy. He will dance with you, and you will swing on a star.
And when you reach up, we will hold your hand.
The ghosts are all gone now.
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They took Mum away for a short break. It was obvious, really. The doctor said it won’t be for long—just until she gets her mind back and stops thinking in that mixed up way where she believes people are dead when they are still alive.
Almost everyone is gone. Pop, Dad, Nana, and my little brother…and my mum.
And Margueretta. She’s locked up forever.
The dangerously insane have to be locked up and shackled for all of our protection. She’s still in a straitjacket. No one can get out of that device. She can’t even scratch her nose or go to the toilet without asking politely for help.
They used to give them ice baths—that certainly silenced them for a time, and then they passed out. When they regained consciousness, the skin was peeling off their bodies like wet tissue paper.
I shouldn’t think about these things anymore. Not now. Margueretta is never coming back.
The moon is shining through the window tonight, making shadows of tree branches on my bedroom walls. The shadows dance like ancient slaves wanting to be released. You can’t see those shadows when you close your eyes. You can only see them when they are open.
Mine are open.
At first, it sounds like a dog, howling in the distance. Not every night. But tonight, she’s there—and soon she will be screaming again in the attic. Just above my head.
Some people don’t believe in ghosts. They didn’t know the man who hanged himself in the toilet—a man whose eyes bulged out like gian
t, green marbles, swinging there by his neck from the water pipes.
And they didn’t have a sister who locked them in the cellar where it was so black they wouldn’t know if their eyes were open or closed. Nor did they count up to a thousand and say the Lord’s Prayer, rocking back and forth in that silent, breathless prison.
And they didn’t hear that girl who screams in the attic.
She painted a picture of the thing that came into her bedroom time and again and told her to kill herself. The reverend said we had to burn it. As though it were alive. But it never died.
I am glad for people who don’t believe in ghosts. The rest of us have to live with them. They are inside our heads, and they are as real as we make them.
I’m staring at the attic door again. Staring, staring, right above my head. And now I know—because the door is slowly starting to move.
Epilogue
Even though it is told through my eyes, this is Margueretta’s story. She wanted it told but she could never write her story herself, despite many attempts. I wish she was here to read it now, but sadly, Margueretta is no longer with us. There is another story to be told of her continuing fight against the incredible demons that invaded her sanity into adulthood. She fought valiantly with the disease of paranoid-schizophrenia and eventually it won. Now she is at peace and I forgive her with all my heart for everything.
Childhood-onset schizophrenia is thankfully very rare. It is an appalling and incurable disease, although it can be somewhat controlled with effective medication. It often manifests itself in the child hallucinating and hearing voices that seem to have an independent existence. I can only imagine the horror of living with a voice inside my head telling me to kill myself or it will kill me.
Mum has celebrated her eightieth birthday in amazing health. She is the true survivor and I will always love her dearly for the incredible way in which she managed to hold things together. God knows that it would have been hard enough to survive being abandoned by my father to bring up three children alone in an era when a single parent was very uncommon and even despised. But to deal with the additional horror of a child suffering from schizophrenia is frankly more than most people could cope with. But my mother did cope and she did survive and because of her, we all survived.
Dad drank himself to death. He died alone and penniless at the age of fifty-seven. I did not meet him again until I was eighteen. Bizarrely, he died on my birthday—the same birthday that I shared with my two sisters. I don’t read anything into this and before he died, I forgave him for abandoning us, but I am not sure if he ever forgave himself. I still crave his recognition and keep his postcard with me at all times, for I am the man of the house now.
Emily, my beautiful and lovely twin sister, has an incredible outlook on life and always seems to be happy and optimistic. She has a wonderful family and I will forever look up to her, even though I am her big brother, having been born thirty minutes before her. And now that I am a grown-up, I don’t mind holding her hand—even if she is a girl.
Nana died in her ninety-fifth year. When I die, I will run to meet her. She will hold me tight and whisper stories of the Highlands, of chasing the golden-tailed dragonfly in the dappled dusk. She will cook me bubble-and-squeak on the old stove and sit me on her lap by the fire. For you are never cold or hungry in Heaven. And you are always loved.
A man did hang himself in the toilet. It was before I was born and Nana and Margueretta enjoyed embellishing that tale. But even so, for all of my life, someone or something has lived right behind me, just visible in the corner of my eye. Fragments of the black cloak continue to smother me in dreadful, breathless moments. I am still anxious about everything, especially the darkness that comes down from the attic and joins with the darkness of the night. I have a dark place inside my head that I stole from the cellar but I fill my life with the bright light of my wonderful wife and children.
At times, the pain of writing this book has been unbearable. As the words found their way onto the page, I realized something: every emotional detail of my childhood was still alive. The fears and horrors were still living inside my head. The ghosts of my childhood were still haunting me.
But I realized something even more profound: twenty years of my adult life were missing. I had been sleepwalking through my adult years by numbing myself from those childhood horrors. The story of my life had a beginning but it had no middle. I had surrendered my life to the banality of a meaningless job, the drudgery of monthly bills and the anesthetizing effect of the daily cocktail hour.
Someone had stolen my life. And I was the thief.
That’s when my life took on a new meaning. I could not waste another minute. For the first time, I wanted to do something that actually mattered, something I loved doing and something that might make a positive difference to other people’s lives. I had to finish writing Margueretta’s story.
There is a book inside every one of us. It is being written every day. Don’t leave any pages blank.
Make it memorable until the end.
The Boy Who Lived With Ghosts: A Memoir Page 32